Celebrities Really Couldn’t Take Criticism This Week

A few thin-skinned celebrities are having a mighty hard time taking criticism this week. On Thursday morning, actress Olivia Munn tweeted a veritable screed on what she called the “ugly behaviors” of fashion bloggers the Fug Girls, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, in response to a recent post on their website, Go Fug Yourself. It said Munn’s striped, sparkly suit looked like a costume from a hypothetical sequel to American Hustle, which . . . well, it kind of did.

Munn’s “essay” (?) came just a few days after Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande each fired off several tweets bristling at E!’s Nightly Pop host Morgan Stewart, who accused Bieber of lip-synching in his surprise cameo—and his first performance in about two years—during Grande’s second Coachella set on Sunday. Which . . . well, he kind of was. This was evidenced by video, and by both his and Grande’s admissions that he’d been singing over a track—a routine practice, they said, but one Bieber appeared pretty casual about, sometimes chiming in over said track at quite a Milli Vanilli–esque delay.

In a five-tweet response, Bieber went so far as to suggest Stewart’s criticism was dangerous: “Why spend your time tearing people down,” he wrote. “It’s people like you that are bullies at school that are making kids suicidal.” In a few now-deleted tweets of her own, Grande backed up Bieber, writing: “We also decided to do this 10 minutes before my set started. We had 0 soundcheck, 0 rehearsal. U were singing with the back tracking like most cameos do.” It was a defense that, incidentally, only served to prove Stewart’s point about Bieber’s performance.

In yet another instance of a celebrity taking morbid offense to perfectly reasonable criticism—because three’s a trend after all!—the rapidly rising singer/rapper/flautist/master twerker Lizzo subtweeted Pitchfork contributing editor Rawiya Kameir for her (actually largely positive) review of Lizzo’s much buzzed-about new album, Cuz I Love You this week. “People who ‘review’ albums and don't make music themselves should be unemployed,” Lizzo tweeted in all capital letters. This after Kameir’s review hailed Lizzo as a “clear,” charismatic talent with a “powerful voice,” and praised her for embracing the mantle of body positivity, but dared to note, as a seasoned music critic, that Lizzo’s very first full-length album wasn’t perfect. Kameir had the audacity to offer the nuanced idea that “some of the album’s 11 songs are burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping.”

Celebrities clapping back at critics is disturbing on a few levels, not least of all because the media industry on the whole is already under siege by a president who has declared it the “enemy of the people.” Additionally, the argument, as made by Lizzo, that only fellow artists—those that are creating themselves—be permitted to share criticism is, to borrow a descriptor from Kameir’s review, “hollow.” Indeed, Kameir is creating; she’s creating criticism, as an informed, experienced journalist.Then there’s the irresponsibility factor, when wildly famous celebrities with massive platforms, particularly in the case of Bieber and Grande, who have 105 million and 62 million followers, respectively, single out a critic or critics—who, in all of the above cases, were women—on Twitter, the very platform notorious for sexist and misogynist abuse. It felt particularly egregious for Munn, who has almost 900,000 followers, to include photos of Cocks and Morgan in her lament.

But perhaps most glaring in all three instances of this week’s anti-critic resistance is that the stars warped their critics’ arguments into something far more dangerous or damaging than they really are. It would be fair for Munn or Bieber or Grande or Lizzo, to point out racist, sexist, or otherwise cutthroat critiques. But they are not. Munn all but accuses the Fug Girls of being antifeminist hypocrites who contribute to the “minimization of women” and the perpetuation of the idea that a woman’s worth is tied to her looks. But, in fact, Cocks and Morgan never skewer women’s weight or character or “worth”; they largely comment and critique clothes, including celebrating certain outfits. (They do not, like Perez Hilton of yore, traffic in cruelty, doodling horns atop famous heads.) And while it is inherently subjective, and a celebrity is welcome to feel offended about it, as Los Angeles Times writer Meredith Blake tweeted in response to Munn's complaint, there’s nothing anti-feminist about fashion criticism.

Nor did Stewart’s entirely justified criticism of Bieber’s sloppy return to the stage contain the vitriol, as he alleged, of a bully. There is an apparent impulse by the celebrities in question to interpret criticism of their music, or their clothes, as cutting attacks on their whole beings. Perhaps they’re emboldened by their followings on social media and the brands they’ve created, their ability to side-step traditional news outlets and communicate directly with their fans, and it’s led to more delicate egos, thinner skins for standard criticism. It’s as if these artists can’t separate criticism of their art with criticism of their identity—particularly if that identity is one focused on a very welcome inclusive ideal, as with Lizzo, body positivity. Kameir is a critic so good, she almost seemed to anticipate the backlash: that it would be tricky to assess Lizzo’s album at the risk of seeming like she doesn’t support Lizzo’s message (which, by all accounts, she certainly does).

“An artist’s identity and how it is narrativized are by necessity inextricable from their work,” Kameir wrote in the Pitchfork review, “making the task of assessing an album’s merit increasingly layered and complex.”

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